No turning back now!

All my life I have felt young, and I have yearned to be older, wiser, more experienced, more mature, highly regarded.  I assume we all have felt that way from time to time.  I remember in grade school I would watch the older kids sitting in the back of the bus.  The girls with their pierced ears, their cooler backpacks.  By the time I was old enough to ride in the back of the bus though (which I actually never did by the way lol)  I was dreaming about bigger and better things.  I couldn't wait to move on to jr high school with lockers and make up and (hopefully) boys :) I still felt too young, like too much of a baby to get the things I really wanted.  When jr high days came, I was looking onward to high school.  Thinking about cars, part time jobs, real boyfriends, college applications, the future.  And as you might imagine, high school years were filled with dreams about the freedoms of college, the thrill of higher education, the excitement of striking out on my own.  It seemed no matter what I did, no matter how many years went by, I was still just too frustratingly young!  I felt young on my wedding day (and I suppose at 21, I was)  and I was sure there were probably a few well meaning guests in the crowd silently shaking their heads at my youthful fool-hardiness.  I felt too young when my son was born.  Like I wouldn't be taken seriously as a mother because I still had a baby face myself.  Every time a stranger responded with surprise when I told them "actually this is my son"  I felt the desire to speed up time, to go shop for a new wardrobe, to re-evaluate the way I wore my hair.  Instead of "Ten Years Younger"  I was on the hunt for "Ten Years Older."

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line I stopped caring.  At some point I settled into myself and I no longer spent time worrying about looking or feeling too young.  Perhaps with the births of my second and third sons, I just became too busy to notice such things.  Who knows. For the past few years, I have even had a hard time remembering my exact age, it just seems to not matter anymore.  Recently however, I have started to be aware of my age in a new way.  I am now closer to 30 than I am to 20.  All of a sudden some of the excuses I have been telling myself for years are getting harder to believe.  I am having a hard time convincing myself that I don't need to worry about daily moisturizers and night creams and eye creams and face scrubs.  I'm having a hard time believing that I don't need to stress if I don't put money into my IRA every month. It's difficult to tell myself it's alright if I'm slacking on my house keeping because I'm a "young mom" after all!  Even more difficult to tell myself I don't need to join a gym yet, because I am still young and can eat whatever I want.

So here's to a new year and the second half of my 20's.  Here's to a new gym membership, skin products, savings plans, housekeeping routines and even self imposed bedtimes. And here's to no longer feeling too young ;-)